5 Ways to Trim down Your Corporate Travel Expenses

Corporate travelling is an important part of the business operations of enterprises dealing with international clients and stakeholders. However, decision-makers dread corporate travelling due to their overwhelming outlays. If you also think that your corporate travel spending has been more than what it should, continue reading this post.

Here, we will discuss ways that can help you reduce your corporate travel spending while keeping your employees and clientele happy and without compromising your interests and stakes.

1. Devise and Implement a Corporate Travel Policy

If a well-thought-out travel policy is not governing your business travelling, there are strong chances that you won’t manage the relevant expenses. It is crucial to have a detailed travel policy that touches upon everything— from international travel conditions to booking flights and hotel bookings to meal allowances.

Getting employees to follow the company’s travel requirements becomes easier when a particular travel policy is enforced. Organizations manage to keep their corporate travelling spending within the allocated budget when most of their business travels comply with those requirements.

2. Put Up a Robust Pre-Approval Process

Having a robust pre-approval process is vital for keeping your corporate travel cost-effective. A pre-approval process ensures that no unnecessary travelling happens. This approval system also saves the business from cancelling the already booked trips. Cancelling such bookings is not just a hassle and involves needless work. It also hurts your bottom line with cancellation charges.

You can also introduce a travel request procedure in your pre-approval process for flexible dates. It will ensure that your in-house travel manager or the 3^rd party operator can plan the trip on dates when your company can get the lowest travelling and accommodation costs. This travel request procedure will prevent you from planning your corporate travelling in and around holidays and peak seasons in destination cities when prices of air tickets, rooms, commute, and meals go through the roof.

3. Sign up Accommodation and Commute Partners

If your business travelling is centred on particular destinations, you should partners with hotels and commute companies working there. When you get a hotel on board for recurring services, you can easily earn significant room discounts. Similarly, car and cab services on a contract will offer better services and low fares than regular commuting options. You can also get discounts on your frequent air travel to certain destinations, depending on your travelling volume.

Even if your corporate travelling map is scattered, you can still save a significant amount on individual costs by searching for discount offers by air carriers, hotels, etc. at your destination. Here, a strong travel search engine can come in handy. A good travel search engine lets you search for multitudes of air travel, hotel accommodation options all around the world from a single platform.

4. Incentivize Employees to Spend Less

One another way to cut the costs of your corporate travel is to incentivize your employees. You can ask your frequently travelling team members to spend less on trips and keep a share of that savings. Having this voluntary incentive program is better than forcing employees to spend less.

When employees know that they have to make their own decisions about saving the travelling cost and getting a cut from it as well, they do it more happily and willingly. Many enterprises have reported saving significant travel expenses by rewarding their responsible travelling team members.

5. Have an In-House Travel Management System

Last but not least, you need a resourceful in-house travel management system to reduce your corporate travel expenses. Your enterprise will incur an upfront cost of deploying this management system. However, it will help you streamline every element of your business travelling and make it cost-effective for good.

The travel system enables you to devise customized travel policies and successfully implement them. You can also have all the travel spending reporting in one place and get consolidated invoicing for all the organization’s travel services.

Similarly, the travel system lets you track and oversee all the corporate trips on one centralized platform. You can also use the same travelling system to set up self-booking for your travelling team, along with the pre-approval process discussed above.

In short, a robust travel management system tailored for your business travelling needs can help you improve your travelling arrangements and identify and control all the expense leakage.

Two Things to Avoid While Reducing Corporate Travel Expenses

Before we wrap up this article, you need to discuss that not all corporate travel cost-cutting measures effectively. Some might do more harm than good. We have identified two of those counterproductive cost-saving measures that organizations should steer clear of.

1. Don’t Abolish Tiered Privileges

It might sound good to have a travel policy that treats everyone equally. However, that’s not how the corporate world works. Don’t remove business privileges just because it can save you costs. C-suite executives and other senior stakeholders won’t like getting their premium travelling services taken away. Therefore, you have to set travelling standards based on the organizational hierarchy.

2. Don’t Book Hotel Rooms on Sharing

Sending your team with shared room bookings will save you some cost on the trip. However, it won’t sit well with your team. After spending hectic hours with clients in a foreign land, everyone wants to have quality me-time and privacy at the end of the day. This is not possible if employees have to share hotel rooms. Saving accommodation costs is not a better option than having a disgruntled workforce in the long run.

TravnetTech can help you establish the travelling digital infrastructure that can save you significant corporate travel expenses. We can devise a travel management system from scratch and in line with your exact business requirements. Our experts can also equip your operations with a front office, travel search engine, marketing automation, and other digital infrastructure in line with modern travel technological requirements.